A blog article or a microblog article published within a certain time segment may be searched in some situations. For example, a user may want to find and view an interesting quotation or article published at a certain time, and the user may search for the blog content within a specified time segment via a search time segment range in a blog search entry. For example, the blog content may be searched for content added on the previous day, within the last three days, or the like.
In an existing blog content search method, inverted data blocks are generated according to an reverse chronological sequence of articles based on their respective publication time. The inverted data blocks may include an inverted index data structure storing a mapping from the content, such as words to corresponding locations in a database file, or in a document, or a set of documents. The inverted data blocks may be used to perform a full text search to find particular words in the blog content. Upon receiving a search request including constituent search terms and a search time segment, the inverted data blocks of the constituent search terms are obtained and then merged. It is then determined whether the publication time of the content corresponding to the merged blocks is within the search time segment in the search request. The merged blocks are discarded if the publication time is not within the request time segment, else and the merged blocks are used as a qualified result if the corresponding publication time is within the requested time segment. When merging of the inverted data block of a search term is completed, merging continues to be performed on a next inverted data block of the search term, until merging of all inverted data blocks of the search term is completed or enough results are found.
In the existing blog content search method, merging and determining are performed on each inverted data block, which causes a long searching time, and a user needs to wait for a long time to obtain the search result. In addition, in the existing blog content search method, the result is returned, and the search is stopped, when certain amount of blog content is found. Therefore, the user may not find the expected result since not all results are returned.